Karaoke Forums

Is it better to setup your amp in sterio or mono for large bar venue?

Derfus

Most any bar setting, mono is fine.  Reason being, karaoke tracks are recorded in stereo, if you run it stereo in the bar, one side of the room may not hear the entire signal - guitars are often panned left & right, drums are panned to resemble a circle, etc..when these songs get played back, it's almost impossible for the entire room to benefit from any stereo effect.  Plus running mono you can gain the added benefit (if your amp & speakers are able to handle it) of more power by bridging the amp.

_________________
LIKE Lonman on Facebook - Lonman Productions Karaoke & my main site via my profile!

I agree mostly) with LON on this one.  I run in MONO, becasue of the reason he stated.

But if by chance your venue had a stage/performance area where it was able to place the left speaker on one side of the stage and the right on the other, and the WHOLE bar was able to hear BOTH speakers, running in stero would be OK.

My amp is spec'ed at 800W into 4 ohms in bridged mode (Behringer PMH3000). I have two speakers with Speakon connectors (Behringer B1520), and I see diagrams where they are chained together for mono operation.  Is this a normal capability, and is it possible to connect them in parallel to lower the impedance of my two 8 ohm speakers to 4 ohms?

I wish there were a "Live Sound for Dummies" book to get me started. Not that I am a complete dummy, but I find a great lack of explicit information available about speaker hookups.

I also wonder about the connection of the Speakon connectors, since their pinouts are quite different. With my Samson power amp used for a floor monitor, I can use a banana plug that is connecting one pin from one channel and one from the other to change the pinout for bridged mode. But I don't know what the equivalent thing is for Speakon; is there an adapter jumper or something?

We run stereo.  To us it sounds better.  Of course you have to have your speakers placed properly.

_________________
You can be strange but not a stranger

Mono is the way we go; multiplex discs don't sound good on stero.

_________________
I can neither confirm nor deny ever having or knowing anything about nothing.... mrscott

You have to make sure your amp can handle a 4 ohm load in bridge mode.  Some amps can only go as low as 8 ohms - and I just looked at your amps spec sheet & it can't go lower than 8 ohms so connecting both speakers in bridge mode isn't an option for you (unless you really want to get into different wiring like series and raise the load to 16 ohms, but then you are defeating the purpose of bridging for power).  If your amp has banana plugs (most amps do & use both positive terminals for the actual bridge connection), i'd just get a couple banana to speakon adapters & use that instead of trying to rewire your speakon ends to work in bridge mode.

_________________
LIKE Lonman on Facebook - Lonman Productions Karaoke & my main site via my profile!

Aha, so you can do it if you wire properly. But you are right, I can't do four ohms anyway.

I can run one channel in four ohms, though, but it doesn't change things much. I already have an amp for my foldback/monitor, so I wouldn't really be gaining anything unless I could run a subwoofer off of one channel and the two parallel-hooked speakers off another.

Both ends are speakon, so I think I would have to rewire anyway. It seems there might be an easy way to make an inline adapter to hook in parallel, but I don't see parallel wiring mentioned anywhere out there on the net in regard to live sound. It seems it would make sense to do it sometimes, but it doesn't seem to be done. Strange.

Thanks for the tips, Lonnie. I appreciate you sharing your expertise.

Some speakers have a 'through' jack where you could just daisy chain one speaker to another.  That would effectively get your parallel connection.

Specialty wiring is involved.  You can actually wire 4 (or more) 8 ohm speakers together to yield a single 8 ohm load by using a series/parallel connection.

_________________
LIKE Lonman on Facebook - Lonman Productions Karaoke & my main site via my profile!